PETER LUCAS: Hillary anchors run to 'war on women'

If Hillary Clinton were truly interested in fighting the GOP "war on women," she should come to Boston and watch the local news

She could then declare victory, dictate a peace plan, and go home.

The women won the war. The men of television news, weather and sports -- except for a token here and there -- have been confronted, beaten and vanquished.

Talk about an extinct species. The next time you see a man commanding a television anchor desk early in the morning, take a picture. He will probably be replaced tomorrow, and your kids might appreciate it as a piece of history.

The days of Tom, Dick & Harry manning the early-morning anchor desks on television news shows are over. They have been replaced by Kim, Kate & Kerry. But before you complain, consider that it might be for the better. Not only are the women of television news more articulate, they are awake, better dressed and more attractive.

In the old days, the news director would worry about Tom, Dick & Harry even showing up in the early morning, and if he did, the news director had to worry about whether he had a hangover, since he always looked as though he had slept in his clothes.

You see, many of those early television reporters came not from television finishing school, but from the school of hard knocks, which was the newspaper business. And some of them, unfortunately, brought with them the bad habits of the newspaper trade, which was hanging out in bars too often and often too long.

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Those worries are gone. Now the women of early-morning television news come to work all fired up and ready to go. How they do it is anybody's guess. They have go to bed early, get up around 3 a.m., get to the station by 4 a.m., and be on the air at 4.30 a.m. That is about the time that Tom, Dick & Harry used to go to bed.

And then, not only are Kim, Kate & Kerry alert and perky, but they are fashionably dressed and coiffed, looking as though they are going out for cocktails, dinner and a show after the news broadcast.

So it's no wonder the women won, as they are winning everywhere, which means that the issue of the GOP "war on women" is as phony as an issue can be. Still, that is not stopping Hillary Clinton from making her attack on the so called Republican "war on women" a major part of her unannounced candidacy for president.

The former secretary of state has a new book coming out -- timed for the 2016 election -- in which she warns that "the clock is turning back" on gains women have made in the U.S., and that women's rights must be emphasized in the future.

She is also a contributor to a new report released last week by activist Maria Shriver and the liberal Center for American Progress on women in which she writes that fighting for women's rights is not a luxury but "a core imperative" for every society.

Clinton, it will be recalled, last year launched her "No Ceilings" project which, based on her husband Bill Clinton's Global Initiative, seeks to harness private resources to measure the progress women have made in various societies and to "bring abuses out of the shadows."

The project is being framed around the 20th anniversary in 2015 of the United Nations fourth Conference on Women in Beijing, a conference she attended as first lady.

This is all to the good. No one should be discriminated against because of their gender or race or religion.

But in Clinton's case, it is more like a Democratic Party "war on men" than a GOP "war on women."

Hillary Clinton needs a big female voter turnout to be elected president, should she be the party nominee, because men are less inclined to support her. And if women are being held back, as she says, obviously it is men doing it -- Republican men. Republican men are "warring" on women, she says. It is silly, but in this dumbed-down age, it works.

It is true that her presidential candidacy would be historic. It is also true that the establishment media, which savaged her in 2008 to make way for Barack Obama, will return to the fold and support her in 2016. Back then, among reporters and Democrats (same thing), being a black candidate for president trumped being a woman running for president.

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